Can I add an "msata" drive to my T510? and more ?'s...

[dt911]

Use it as my primary boot drive? I have a T510 4313-cto that was ordered without WWAN. From what I understand, I have the available slot, but I have not seen any posts about the T510 and an msata drive.

1) Is this even possible on my machine?
2) Is there a way to configure it in a mirrored RAID array with my existing SSD?
3) Should there be any problem cloning my existing drive to the msata drive with Acronis or a similar program?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[Q-Ball]

Unfortunately, only the T520 has the slot. The T510 doesn't have the mSATA port.

But, fear not! mSATA is not the only kind of SSD out there.
There are ones out there that are natively miniPCIe- so they WILL work in the slot (the computer just sees it as just another drive).

The only problem is that, well, you can't boot off of it. The T510 doesn't have the BIOS capability for that (won't boot from mPCIe slots).

You'll have to re-install Windows on to the mini SSD: though you'll need to set it up so that the Windows 7 bootloader (or you may have to use a different bootloader such as GRUB) will chain-load the OS from the SSD from the main drive (since the BIOS won't boot from the SSD even though the SSD does support that, AFAICT).


So you'll need to go get a (mPCIe) Super Talent CoreStore MV- it's not an mSATA drive: it's a proper mPCIe drive so it will work here.
I don't know of any others that do this (Intel 310/311 won't work, Rennet SSDs won't work, Kingston mSATA SSDs won't work, etc.)

That will work in a T510- it's proven to work in a T410s.


Best of luck: you'll be the second I've seen to try this.



As an addendum:

Now, what I'd be doing is, well, not doing that (unless you need to swap the main SSD on a regular basis).
I'd still get the Super Talent drive, but know that your SSD in the primary bay is faster than the CoreStore MV- I believe that since you're using an Intel X-25M SSD, I believe you're going to get better results having the OS on the main SSD (X25-M drives are known for their high random read speeds).
Benchmarks are very sparse so I can't confirm that. But the difference, if there is one, shouldn't be too big.

By the way, the CoreStore MV isn't a SandForce-based drive (it uses a Marvell controller) so you shouldn't have to worry about the woes occuring in that world right now (SF-2200 drives are known for the lovely bluescreens they throw in your face every so often).


And no, I don't think you can use RAID with this.